Who You Calling A Jesse?

I don’t know how long it has been there but I just noticed Facebook added a stats option. This is pretty cool because it gives you some idea how many people are in your network, what they are up to, what events are going on, etc. I am in the University of Waterloo (where I work), University of Liverpool (where I am doing my grad work), and Kitchener (because ‘Kitchener’ cover the Waterloo Region).

I am not totally surprised but there are 22 000 members in the Waterloo group. If you take all the staff, faculty, and students (rounded up a lot to around 25 000) that is 88%. Sure there are likely some Alumni in there now but still… That is a really high percentage. Kitchener in comparison has 61 600, the region has 500 000 people in it…

In Facebook stats you can poke around at other network summaries. WLU down the road has 11 500 people, U of Toronto has 50 000, UWO nearly 30 000, and Conestoga College doesn’t even have a space.

If you have an event or message to get out to the Waterloo community, Facebook seems to have a massive chunk of your audience. Just remember, UW Events lets you pull events you post in Facebook to UW Events… if you have one in there get it over to UW Events!

I really hate posting things like this but I don’t want to say too much about what I have been working on. Not because it is top secret or anything, just that I don’t want people to look at it until it is presentable. Instead, let me tell you about the technology I have been playing with:

• Dreamweaver, Contribute, and Photoshop CS3 – These great applications (I would have liked a UI update on the lines of other OS X pro apps but ah well, next time). The speed improvements alone make them fun to use. I have been working on some new CSS lately for a new ‘International’ web site and Dreamweaver CS3 has been so nice to me.
• Ruby on Rails – ya ya I am a big RoR convert. Not because I can code it though. I love it because I find it much easier to manage a project that is using it. We have a new Experts and Speakers application along with something else in the works and I just love rails. It is even more exciting at the moment because there is some time going into optimizing the server environment.
• Twitter – if I haven’t said it before, I will say it now… this is one addictive web app and it might actually be useful. It is a really good knowledge dump.
• BarCampWaterloo – just over two weeks until the fourth BarCamp in Waterloo. Hoping it is the biggest one yet!

…oh and Facebook is starting to get creepy. No idea why, after a year in there with a few UW folks I was comfortable hanging out. Now it just insane and insane in a way that those of you who just got to University might never understand as you haven’t lost touch with people for 10 years. That is another post ;)

Details coming on our cool app.. promise.

Like everyone else I am deeply saddened by what happened yesterday at Virginia Tech. From the shootings yesterday to the memorial today there has been a lot of second guessing VT’s communications. I have no idea what they might have got wrong but I would like to point out something they got right—their web site.

I first noticed yesterday they had stripped down their site and placed their official statements on there. That is what you would expect but I also noticed a podcast of a statement from the President of the University. Then a bit later a whole new design appeared. The page is 100% dedicated to getting important information out while expressing the feeling on the campus as a whole. They are using podcasts as the primary method of getting the word out with a counselling being discussed and a link over to a page that has even more updates and an archive.

Yesterday it appeared they might have had to move servers as the load increased with the media coverage. At the very least they optimized the site.

I am going to use this post to collect online reaction to the tragedy and how technology played a role or could play a better role:

• Cole Camplese has some thoughts about how technology can help in crisis situations like this.
• The Chronicle questioning the time of the email sent – requires you be on a campus that subscribes to the Chronicle.
• Timeline of how the VT home page changed over the day

The space is booked, posters are made, and we have a couple sponsors lined up already. The fourth BarCampWaterloo will hopefully be our biggest yet! There already a few people signed up, Simon and I are hoping to see us break that 50 mark this time. We know you folks are out there…

I will demo CPA’s latest Ruby on Rails creation which should be up and running by then. This project is part of the larger MMNP initiative and I hope folks around here will love it.

Once again it is CSS naked day and I decided to shed the CSS for this blog for just one day. It is nice to have a look at my site with no CSS and see how it works. I think web folks often create a site and then tweak the CSS, maybe monkey with the XHTML, and its done. It is nice to go back to 1994 ;)

I do have one thought on naked day though. It should be the last day of April so that when these sites get dressed again we can show off our new clothes as part of the CSS Reboot.

Update: Returning things back to normal now. I changed the CSS a bit and dropped the sFIR.

By no means is this a new idea but it is certainly bothering more now than ever before. Why must I fill out all the same information on every social network site I visit? Why can’t I use something like OpenID to store all those boxes and the social network can get it from there? Secondly why can’t I get my profile information out? Facebook’s API is decent but generally useless as I can’t really grab the profile information I want. Sure I can pull events but I can’t put any back… It’s the same boring information.

This annoyance was brought on finally by Virb. I love the site, I appreciate the Flickr integration, but the bands I like are sorta in Facebook (I got bored, couldn’t list them all) and I am too lazy to fill in the boxes again.

This has come up with applications here. I want to share contact information between applications but I can’t. We have centralized authorization but it just tells me who they are (with the name they gave HR) and not much else. I want to try and fix that for the apps CPA manages and offer it to others at UW who want to use it.

I am still in the planning stage but I propose an update for Kiwi that is a sort of add-on to the core service of authentication. Here is what I want to add:

• Profile creation – email preferences, SMS, etc. The fields should be flexible and will certainly grow.
• Sharing between apps that use Kiwi for authentication.
• Once Kiwi logs you in you can go to any Kiwi authenticated application without logging in again.
• OpenID will be allowed to be used to authenticate, Kiwi will manage that.

Yes this all exists in other applications out there but not here. I want to play with OpenID anyway so here is my chance. What do you think? Is the effort worth it?

Well it looks like this is my last post. Starting today the University will shut off its Internet connection due to security concerns. There was a move to simply remove all web browsers in favour of Lynx and firewall the campus so only port 80 worked but bandwidth concerns ended that.

“We just use too much internets,” states Yuri a network specialist in IST. “With the CS club choking the tubez and all the hackers from Romania attacking the networkz we need to just shut things down to protect us all from the internet.” Roger, Director of Networkz, adds “in the 24 years I have worked on networkz at UW it has been nothing but trouble, I think this will allow us to focus on core services.”

The faculty association has hinted that they will welcome this move as there has been concern that students are spending more time in Facebook than they are in Angel. They are even using MSN during class time.

With the loss of Internet it is anticipated that the productivity levels of all students, staff, and faculty should go up. I imagine the next surplus sale will attract many historical computing buffs looking for ancient network gear… ;)